Less than 1 in 3 accidental deaths is auto accident related.
More people commit suicide (42,000) than die in auto accidents (40,000).
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php
Deaths per mile driven have plummeted over time. From 24 per million miles in 1921, to 7 per hundred million miles in 1950, to 2.5 PHMM in the 1980s, 1.5 PHMM in early 2000s and now about 1.1 per hundred million miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
They are set to plunge further as automated braking and collision avoidance become standard features over the next decade.
Edits: Corrected to deaths per 100M miles, not deaths per 1M miles.
Yet the general response to 1/70 people deaths being because of cars is "meh, oh well."
Everytime I see someone driving terribly I know there's a 50%+ chance they have a sizable dent on their car from a car crash or from them hitting some inanimate object. It's actually a game I play - I'll see someone driving poorly and then say "where's the dent" and look for it. Sometimes I'll even switch lanes to check the other side where it will inevitably be. For certain cars like the Pontiac Grand-Am, my theory puts the dent % and dent damage much higher.
In many ways, insurance and how we treat collisions as "accidents" enables them to drive with no regard. By the time they're dropped from insurance, they probably already hurt someone.
But anyway, 4.6 M injuries isn't rare. "But there are also millions more who are seriously injured — an estimated 4.6 million in 2016 according to NSC" [1]
If someone's car is dented, like real dents from a crash, I take extra precaution. It's a filter that works. I'll notice big dents all the time and then the person drives like shit but I'm aloof and safe. I look for people on the phone (calling or texting) too and avoid them. I'll look for 90+ year old people too; their reflexes aren't as quick.
Knock on wood, but I've never been in a car crash. Apart from when I was stupid as a teenager, I'm very cautious.
It's the same reason people shrug their shoulders when a mafia guy gets gunned down but lose their shit when a child is killed by stray gunfire. The mafia guy opted in to the risk.
Add in an estimated 53,000 deaths in the US due to transportation emissions.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231013...
Potentially millions killed by auto emissions worldwide.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/dec/17/pollutio...
The leading cause of death in the US for people under the age of 25.
This isn't even considering the massive amounts of secondary pollution via production and maintenance of vehicles, the enormous land use and sprawl costs (financially and environmentally), harm done via driving induced stress and sedentary lifestyles.
Cars may be getting safer on those who can afford to be on the inside, but for everyone else outside they're a nightmare. Our climate, resource and many of our social problems are not going away as long as we center society around the car.
Except that buses and trains and horses and teslas kill people and pollute. Even bikes kill people. Every mode of transportation is a killer, so if you want to eliminate travel deaths you can only eliminate travel.
If you eliminated cars completely tens of thousands would likely still die in the US from transportation accidents. But now you've trapped people and forced them to live close to work, do less traveling, and live crappier lives.
Automobiles provide freedom to choose where you want to live and work. They are cleaner than ever and getting cleaner every year.
And the vast majority of the US is empty land.
And the below age of 25 stat is incredibly misleading. People under the age of 25 rarely die of disease or cancer, which are by far the leading causes of death. They rarely die at all which is why car accidents are disproportionally represented for young people. In reality 99% of people who die had a cause of death unrelated to traffic accidents.
Also, forcing cities to accommodate cars via zoning has lead to a huge host of problems, from making centers that are no longer walkable, and destroying the social fabric of the city that used to happen via face to face interactions. Anywhere there is fast traffic, people no longer want to walk, because it's incredibly stressful being near speeding cars.
If you want a visible demonstration of the difference, visit some small pre-car cities in Italy, the public places are wonderful, and you can see people bumping into each other and chatting all the time. People walk everywhere. Compare with the sprawling wastelands of asphalt we've created, including on some of the most expensive parking lots in the world in Silicon Valley.
Even relatively podunk towns have typically walkable centers and local transit connecting to frequent regional train service and sometimes stops by long distance, high-speed services.
In Germany, regional all day rail passes can be had for as little as 10 EUR! I imagine the situation is quite similar in Italy.
>>Automobiles provide freedom to choose where you want to live and work. They are cleaner than ever and getting cleaner every year.
I think you're still ignoring the pollution deaths and massive negative external effects the automobile has on society, especically on those who can't participate in an auto-dominated society. The waste is colossal.
Automobiles provide freedom if you're luck enough to not be young, old, poor, disabled etc. Why do we want to design society around excluding huge groups from mobility, when bikes, effective public transit and walkability can open up our country to everyone?
My job is 20 miles away, I'm not riding a bike. I don't want to spend hours going to and from work every day. I'm not moving my kids into a shittier house without a big yard in a shittier school district, just so I can bike to work.
I'm not going to move my family in a shitty apartment just so we can have "density" and force everyone to use shitty mass transit.
My daughters dojo is 5 miles from my house, she ain't walking there. I'm not sending her to the shitty dojo down the street.
No one is getting excluded. The young, old, poor and disabled are driven everywhere in cars. If they can't drive themselves, someone drives them. Thats what we do for family members. And soon the car itself will drive them.
There are plenty of ways to have a accesible city designed for multimodal transportation. Look to many European cities to show how this used to be done. It doesn't take much imagination to find out it doesn't have to be "shitty".
I don't think you really understand what life is like without a car in America. Like it or not, people are being excluded. A third of households in my city don't have a car (likely not out of choice). Transit is sparse. How are they supposed to access job centers, , shopping education opportunities built in the auto dominated sprawl? Hint: you can't build your life around asking other people for rides.
You don't seem open to the idea of a different lifestyle. I get that. At the very least I ask that you consider the real impact your choice of driving has on other people, and how it's subsidized by society.
Sorry?
2) You can get cancer from many other things than cigarettes.
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/lung-cancer/ris...
> Smoking tobacco is one of the biggest causes of lung cancer. More than 8 out of 10 lung cancers (80%) are caused by smoking .This includes breathing in other people’s cigarette smoke.
https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/alcohol-facts/health-effects-of...
> Over the long term, drinking alcohol increases your risk of serious illnesses, such as mouth, throat and breast cancer1. Of course, not everyone who drinks will get cancer. But scientists have found that some cancers are more common in people who drink alcohol than those who don’t.
[...]
> One study has estimated that around 4% of all cancers are due to alcohol consumption
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-39920052
For many of those, it was someone else deciding to drive that killed them.
So yes, if you take slanted statistics and add some "but look over there" rationalizations... well, you still end up at "1 in 3 accidental deaths".
What you should be looking at is comparative injury rates for other methods of transport such as rail or tram. The picture is rather shocking, but even more concerning is the lack of a safety culture in the car manufacturers and ultimately the agencies regulating them and the vehicles on the road. Every plane crash has a root cause investigation, but we still have the same truck designs with massive blind spots because...? By the time autonomous driving becomes a reality cars will still have side mirrors with blind spots, you can't make this stuff up.
Car crashes and suicides are much more likely to kill young people -- while they may be a relatively small proportion of "total deaths" they are a much larger contributor to "loss of average lifespan"
If you're under the age of 35, driving may very well be the most dangerous habit you have.
For people approaching 90, everything from a fall to a cut can be deadly. But that tells us more about 90 year olds than cuts or falls.
Glad you checked all that evidence for us, saves us the hassle.
It's probably less than that since I'm sure the average fatality per accident is >1.
* still a "petrohead" but I prefer light weight and low displacement (Lotus FTW!)
I sure hope I don't live long enough to see a world full of people scared shitless at moving at 80 mph on a road designed for that; and I quite would like to live some time, too.
Transportation and moving around fast is pretty dang valuable. It lets us do a lot of things, markets become larger, and the different number of highly specialized people I can interact with increases.
I wondered if the design of the roads themselves plays a big part, but I no longer think it is very significant here. In South Africa the roads are basically built to British standards but they have even worse safety than the US. The big difference I noticed there is the extreme variety of vehicles on the road. You get modern, powerful cars just like in Europe, but also rattly old rust buckets that would have failed their MOT test in the UK years ago. This variety makes navigating the roads much more difficult.
If we had far better education and mandatory retesting every 10 years accidents would drop significantly.
This phrasing makes me curious: how did "horse-related accidents" rank among the causes of death for people who rode horses everywhere? Or people who rode in horse-drawn carriages everywhere?
Some non-negligible percentage of horse-riding was also done by the nobility, where the horses were used either for hunting, or for military campaigning—both places where a horse "avoiding danger" can actually be fatal.
Re: hunting, horses would often rear back from predatory-looking animals, dropping their riders and possibly dropping onto their riders, crushing and laming/killing them. "Hunting accident" was the old world's "boating accident."
Re: military cavalry usage, horses could be spooked into stampeding—this was an incredibly large problem when in a closely-packed cavalry formation. Cavalry warfare was phased out upon the introduction of guns not because horses were more likely to die by a bullet than by an arrowhead; but rather because the sound of rifle or cannonfire was usually enough to spook horses un-used to the sound, turning many of the first rifle-era battles into instant routs.
I myself used to be a "petrolhead" my 20s and it's quite amazing to observe this awakening when looking in the mirror. I suspect it was caused by the revolution in electric/self-driving tech and traveling more and comparing car-centric US cities to other places.